Saskatchewan NDP Questions Trump Links to Tenants of Bell AI Campus; Province Says Tenants Answer to Canadian Law

Saskatchewan's New Democratic Party said on November 2 that Bell's AI data centre in the Rural Municipality of Sherwood, near Regina, has two main tenants with financial links to U.S. President Donald Trump and his family, at odds with the province's pitch that the project strengthens Canadian sovereignty. CTV News and CJWW radio reported NDP critic Brittney Senger calling the situation "absolutely a threat to our sovereignty," while party leader Carla Beck said having U.S. companies invested in by Trump and his family on Saskatchewan soil "frankly, should be terrifying." These are political claims by the opposition; the reporting does not establish that either company broke the law. (Photo: file image of a data centre, not the Sherwood site itself.)

What the two claims are

The NDP's case has two parts: first, citing White House financial disclosures, it says Trump holds bonds in cloud company CoreWeave; second, it says the investment firm 1789 Capital, connected to Donald Trump Jr., has invested in chipmaker Cerebras. Both companies are named tenants of the Bell campus: Cerebras supplies wafer-scale AI technology for training and inference, and CoreWeave supplies AI computing hosted on NVIDIA GPUs. A bond holding is not the same as share ownership, and an investment by a firm connected to Trump Jr. is not the same as personal ownership; the published reports give no ownership percentages or corporate structures, so readers should weigh the claims as opposition allegations, not verified equity facts.

How the province answered

Jeremy Harrison, the minister responsible for Saskatchewan's Crown Investments Corporation, said he does not know the ownership structure of individual companies, that the same charge could be levelled at many firms, and that the real point is that the tenants fall under Canadian laws and regulations. He also said the arrangement is a partnership between Bell and the tenants and that the province plays no role in choosing who Bell leases to. The government treats tenant selection as a private commercial decision by Bell; the opposition treats it as a public-interest question because the province promotes the project as a landmark investment and has tied SaskTel's network into it.

Scale of the project, and what comes next

The campus started as a 300-megawatt build announced on March 16, 2026. On September 14, Bell and the province signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding proposing up to 900 megawatts more, for a 1.2-gigawatt hub, which the province puts at more than C$50 billion in estimated capital investment. Bell targets the first data halls beginning operations in the first half of 2027. Because the memorandum is non-binding, the extra capacity depends on customer commitments, commercial agreements, permits, approvals and any required environmental assessments; the C$50 billion figure is a plan estimate, not signed contracts.

Sources: CTV News, CJWW radio (via Tech Insider, November 3, 2026), Government of Saskatchewan and Bell announcements.